France, as shown in the novel, can be very homophobic, and the setting of France in this novel helps to illuminate the strife that queer people can face in places that aren’t LBGTQ friendly.īut, I also had a lot of issues with this book. And also, this was great representation for the French queers out there. They fight, they make up, and they keep going because their love is stronger than the small mistakes or fights they have. There’s so many points in the novel where Clementine and Emma fight because Clem doesn’t want to be or isn’t comfortable with being called a lesbian, and I think it’s really heartbreaking to see her struggle with loving the woman she loves and also coming to terms with that.īuilding off of that point, Emma and Clementine do fight – we see it happen a lot, and I think it’s really healthy to show a non-idealized queer relationship. But BITWC shows such a different side of someone’s coming out – Clementine is thrown out of her house by her homophobic parents, some of her friends shun and shame her, and she struggles with her own idea of herself as someone who is dating a woman but doesn’t necessarily identify as a lesbian, and finds that she doesn’t want to. I feel like when queerness is introduced into a novel many times it comes as an easy transition – the people around the queer character immediately accept them, the queer person is happy in their choice to come out, and everything is really great. First of all there was Clementine’s internalized homophobia, and I’m so glad they addressed it, and then there was also the external homophobia that many queer people face on the daily. I loved how much the novel addressed homophobia and how it manifests in so many ways. And I have to say in a lot ways it was super impressive. I went in knowing that there was a gay couple – that’s all I knew. I randomly stumbled on the graphic novel in my office and decided to read it as a break from my work.
Blue is the warmest colour book movie#
I’m sure that people have heard of the movie adaptation that came out 2013, that made a lot of news mainly for featuring a lesbian couple, something that hadn’t been very popular on the big screen, or that tends to be reduced to a very one-dimensional relationship.
So the second ‘book’ that I’ve read this month was the graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Colour.